


O Sing a Song of Calvary

by Ori_Cat



Category: Christian Bible (New Testament), The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Christianity, Gen, Good Friday, No like really Christianity, Reposted following reviewal, You Have Been Warned, i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-31 01:00:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13963956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ori_Cat/pseuds/Ori_Cat
Summary: Manwë, Yavanna, Good Friday, and the dogwood legend.





	O Sing a Song of Calvary

Yavanna was not far within the woods, surrounded by what could only be described as the wreckage of a tree. Branches, twigs, segments of wood, and sheets of bark littered the ground, all covered over with piles of white flowers like a localized snowfall. And there was wood dust, in the air, in the grass, on her dress, in her hair, sticking to the tears on her cheeks. Before her stood a sapling barely taller than a man, its bark the dusty-pale of new growth, its leaves lined and curled. 

He could have stilled the air around himself to conceal his approach - after ages spent in corporeal form one tended to pick up the mannerisms of the Children, including a sense that one ought not intrude on others’ sorrows - but he let the sound be. He had come to talk to her, after all. 

Yavanna turned at the rustle of the grass. “I do not understand.” 

“I know,” he replied. “None of us do.” Except, possibly, for Námo. Manwë rather suspected that the Doomsman had been given instructions from the Father separate from the rest of them for this day. If so, though, he had refused to reveal it to the others. Only said ‘Do not be afraid’, which was difficult advice to follow, today. 

“I only wish we could stop it!” 

“As do I. But He has forbidden us, and no purpose of the Father can be altered. He knows what He is doing.” 

Yavanna visibly stopped herself from replying. But it didn’t matter, because the wind, bringing to Manwë as it did all the voices of all the children in the world, finished the sentence for her. _No, He does not. Where is He now, your God? See how He abandons you._

_Save yourself,_ the wind whispered. Jeered. _Save yourself._

“You are making a new tree,” he said. It was partly a question, partly a statement, so she could answer only if she wished. He had made the mistake of asking a direct question to Aulë earlier in the day, and where his wife’s response was mostly sorrow the Smith’s had been mostly anger. Everything iron in the room had ended up in pooling molten on the floor. 

“No,” she said. “Remaking an old one. The dogwood.” 

No wonder he had not recognized it. The dogwood was thick and tall and straight, a sister tree to her cedars. It was not thin. It did not droop like willow, nor were there knots studding the trunk. “Why the dogwood?” She never changed her organisms without a good reason, not since the very beginning of her work. 

“Because-“ she started, and then broke off, as though there weren’t the words to describe exactly what she meant. Or they were too difficult to say. “May I show you instead?” 

He nodded, and so she stretched out her thought as in the beginning, when they had just been beginning to realize language, and showed him- 

\- a single tree, the old dogwood, straight and tall like she had made it, and men, come with their axes and saws to slice it down and split it into boards. Boards overlapped, one vertical, one horizontal, and notches were cut to hold them together, and - 

\- nails. A hammer blow, and the wood fibres tearing, splitting apart under the blow and the pressure of that square-headed iron point, carrying with it, deep into the wood - 

\- blood. 

“Never again will they make timbers from its boughs. Never again will my creation be used for such evil,” Yavanna said. “I will force His children to remember.” 

_Remember me,_ begged the wind in the voice of a man. 

Manwë picked up one of the discarded white flowers - six-petaled, tapering, like a lily. He remembered how long she and Vána had spent on their flowers at the beginning of the world, painting them in colours visible and invisible and unimaginable, overlapping every petal. 

She reached over to pluck the flower from his fingers and cast it back down onto the ground, instead bending down one of the drooping new shoots of the tree near to their faces. He felt, rather than saw, her send a tendril of power into the meristem to convince it to bud. 

The calyx split, a season’s growth in seconds, and petals began to uncurl. Two vertical. Two horizontal. And nor were they as smooth as they had been, but rather puckered at the tips - punctured - and edged with rust-red. At the flower’s centre, where all four petals met, a tiny cluster of thorns stretched and burst open. 

But Yavanna did not withdraw her hand, and so the flower continued to develop, the petals browning and curling and falling away until she was left with only a cluster of berries shining like rubies. When she released the bough one split and ran red over the ends of her fingers, and she was crying again, the wood dust washing away. Maybe he was too. 

And the wind came, and curled about them, slipping into Manwë’s hearing as though it were the voice and counsel of Ilúvatar - and it was, this time, the proclamation of the One buried among all the other cries and voices of the children: 

_It is finished._


End file.
